The United States announced Thursday that it will drastically reduce the number of refugees it is willing to take in each year, to a historically low number, and said it will favor white South Africans.
In a major shift in a decades-long welcoming tradition, the United States has set the number of people to be granted refugee status this year at about 7,500, compared with about 100,000 a year under former Democratic President Joe Biden.
And the vast majority will be made up of Afrikaners, descendants of the first European settlers in South Africa, according to a White House document released Thursday. “The number of admissions will be distributed mainly among Afrikaners from South Africa (…) and other victims of illegal or unfair discrimination in their respective countries of origin,” adds the text dated September 30 and which must be published this Friday, October 31 in the federal register.
Granting refugee status to Afrikaners
Upon his return to power in January, President Donald Trump sharply cut American foreign aid and tightened immigration policy by focusing on expelling illegal immigrants and freezing the reception of asylum seekers and other refugees.
The republican leader had already issued a decree on February 7 stating that Afrikaners will be dispossessed of their land and persecuted, granting them refugee status. In May, around fifty of them were welcomed into the United States as refugees, a move that Pretoria vigorously contested.
Afrikaners make up the majority of South Africa’s white population. From this segment of the population came the political leaders who established apartheid, a system of racial segregation that deprived the black population – the vast majority – of most of their rights from 1948 to the early 1990s.
In South Africa, the white minority represents just over 7% of the population, but owned up to 72% of agricultural land in 2017, according to government statistics. This discrepancy is the legacy of a policy of expropriation of the black population during colonization and then during apartheid. Laws passed since 1994 now attempt to review this situation.
For his part, President Trump has repeatedly denounced his “terrible situation” and has referred to a “genocide.”
Strict immigration policy
As soon as the decision was announced, NGOs and immigrant advocacy associations complained. Since 1980, “more than two million people fleeing persecution have been admitted to the United States” under the refugee program, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. “From now on it will serve as an immigration route for whites,” he denounced in X.
For his part, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who heads the Global Refuge association, lamented that for decades the refugee program “has been a lifeline for families fleeing war, persecution and repression.”
“At a time when countries like Afghanistan, Venezuela, Sudan and many others are in crisis, concentrating the vast majority of admissions in a single group undermines the objective of the program as well as its credibility,” he said in a statement. The Trump administration had already eliminated a special temporary reception status that protected nationals of Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela in particular.
Source: BFM TV
